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Howard couldn’t find it either

Grant King (“ABC bias is hard to see from within the organisation”, The Australian, Letters, 17/12) is wrong to suggest that it is only internal investigations which have failed to find bias at the ABC. For example, Gans and Leigh (2007) analysed multiple news services over several years, finding only very slight bias on ABC TV – toward the Coalition.

More tellingly, even the Howard Government’s Mansfield review could find no such bias. Of course, this did not budge their preconception that it existed, nor prevent them from breaking an election promise with vengeful cuts and disastrous interference. Like those letter-writers and columnists in The Australian that are “generally agreed” with King, they did not let the facts get in the way of a good story.